I've always loved doing all kinds of vocal performances. Since I was a teenager and first decided that I wanted to be a voice actor and that it was never going to be able to happen, I've jumped on every small opportunity that I've had to do similar things. Voice-over work for friends and even one of my jobs. Recording a parody song I wrote. Doing random little voice-acting snippets on request or whims on social media back when things like AudioBoo were the New Hot Thing. (My personal favorite is the one where I dramatically intoned the Green Lantern oath thing, and followed it up with an abrupt character switch into "Meowth! That's right!") And I even hosted an online radio show for a while - I don't remember the site/station name any more, but I went by DJ Cogsworth and I had a fantastic time streaming instrumental anime soundtracks and sharing weird trivia right in the middle of all the other standard electronic/trance or alt rock/metal time slots.

So of course, as streaming media became more... mainstream... (badum tsh) I'd been wanting to get into it in some way. A podcast was my top choice, but I kept fizzling out on content ideas. Livestreaming was out because I didn't want to use my face, just my voice, and I had even fewer ideas about visual content.

I've been learning how to work with Godot 4 for the past few months, and honestly I think it's a great engine. I like the whole modular design of its scene/node system - it suits the way I like to structure mechanics and stuff really well. GDScript is incredibly easy to pick up if you have any previous programming experience. It's got a ton of useful tools for setting up your 2D (and 3D, but you couldn't pay me to make a 3D game) environments and handling collision physics and all of that stuff. And it's Free and Open Source! Theoretically and philosophically, it was a perfect fit.

But actually making an actual game in it was going... okay. I mean. It was fine? It was fine. I was doing a rework of Flower Magic as my main project, and I had all the major mechanics reimplemented. I made a little pipe-connecting game for practice doing all the finishing touches like GUI and SFX. It was all going pretty well.

One of my oldest game-dev passions has been the realm of "browser games" - a media-genre which I don't know if there's a specific term for, but it's a game, and you play it with your web browser. Not in your web browser - this is an important distinction! We're talking about games that work like websites. Maybe they have some kind of minigames in them that are more "in the browser", maybe not. Games like Kingdom of Loathing or Fallen London. Maybe including the sibling genre of pet games, like Neopets and Flight Rising as well.

I've also been working a lot with Evennia the past few years, mostly working on a massive project that's now dead but also just playing with the framework to see what it could do. It's very much aimed at MUD-style games, but one of its nice features is that it has a built-in integrated website. And every now and then, I think, "what if I made a browser game in Evennia?" and almost immediately land at "nah, that would be a waste".